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With Reorg, Yahoo Braces For Shareholder Meeting

Just two days after floating rumors that Microsoft and Yahoo were once again back at the negotiating table, TechCrunch writer Michael Arrington is now saying that this latest Yahoo reorg, announced yesterday, "is clearly aimed at squashing any lingering hopes for a new Microsoft deal to emerge." Arrington's change of tune comes after speaking with Yahoo Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh, who says, "the signal you should take from this is we believe most of that is over. We need to run this for the long term. While the board was considering the Microsoft deal, it would have been foolish to do a major reorg." Note the operative words "believe," and "most of."

Of course, Arrington points out that Yahoo has a massively important meeting with its legions of angry shareholders on Aug. 1, before which the company needs to try to and build up some resolve. In that light, a reorg could be seen as a necessary step toward appeasing shareholders, but don't expect much in the way of results in five short weeks.

Meanwhile, analyst Jeffrey Lindsay, of Sanford C. Bernstein, kind of shrugged his shoulders at the news. "It's hard to see what significant difference it's going to make," he told Bloomberg. "Certainly previous reorganizations haven't achieved a great deal. Reorganizations at most large Internet companies don't seem to achieve very much, so we're not terribly optimistic."

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